“Thank you, Javier,” I repeated dutifully, but meaning it. Then I did as she asked and shut up. Though it was easier to comply when all the energy had been burned from me.
Somewhere between my consciousness wavering in and out I found myself laying on something soft that smelled like potpourri.
Miranda’s face and other unfamiliar ones appeared and disappeared over me in blurry halos. When I finally came back to my senses, I was lying on a floral couch in a warehouse where one massive wall was covered in television screens. An IV stuck out of my arm next to a pole with a bag of liquid, and I realized I didn’t feel like a dried husk of a being anymore.
Though I desperately needed a dip in the water of my grotto.
“You’re awake,” Miranda’s tense, silky voice said from nearby. My angel of death seated herself next to me on the couch, her warm dry hand covering my forehead as if to check my temperature. I closed my eyes, drinking in her touch. So soft, so perfect, it was like heaven on earth.
Dark circles clung under Miranda’s beautiful brown eyes, and I reached out to wipe them away with my thumb. She leaned into my hand, still blackened and a bit on the charred side. She dropped kisses on the abused fingertips. “How do you feel?” she asked softly.
“It probably looks worse than I feel.”
A line drew between her brows. “You look like you’ve been barbecued and then thrown in a fruit dehydrator.”
“Oh shit, that’s exactly how it feels.” I tried to push up onto my arms, panic lacing my voice. “We can’t stay here too long. Aten will come for us. For me.”
“He won’t find you,” a brusque voice interrupted. I followed it to the swiveling computer chair that turned around to reveal a rather short, stout woman with a close crop of dark hair, and a wide face. An ethereal glow surrounded her. Some of her essence stretched out in thin bright strings to all of the monitors lining the wall and to the pieces of tech surrounding her. The woman was an immortal, fae if I had to guess.
“I like your muumuu,” I said. It had a lot of bright colors on it. Aten long ago incinerated my Hawaiian shirt. Bastard.
Miranda introduced us. “Xander, this is Echo.”
Ah yes, the elusive tech support for our hunts. Then what the woman said sunk in. “He can’t find us, you say, because of technology or magic?”
Echo’s lips thinned so much they disappeared back into her face.
Okaaay, I guess we weren’t in a sharing mood.
“I’m glad you are awake,” she huffed like a bulldog, which made it difficult to believe her. “This one was a nightmare,” Echo jerked her head in Miranda’s direction. “Barking directions and pacing all around you while you slept and healed.”
“Aww, you do care, honeybuns,” I crooned at Miranda. I was feeling particularly mushy since my rescue.
“Well shnookums, someone had to rescue the damsel in distress,” she cooed back though there was a flinty gleam in her eye.
A pretty, teenage girl strode in from an adjoining room wearing an expression that was far too severe for the schoolgirloutfit she wore and the pink pom-poms that held her hair in pigtails.
“She’s ready to talk,” the girl said grimly.
I looked between the three women. “Who’s ready to talk?”
Chapter 32
The Badass
“Since you love talking about Aten, why don’t you tell us a little more about him,” I suggested.
Sunny sat bound to a chair in what seemed to be a cleared-out storage room. Aoiki had captured her when Sunny came poking around to find me.
Sunny had planned to kill Aoiki, Echo, and Ryuki to further isolate me. And since she’d previously posed as Aoiki’s girlfriend, Sunny knew all the weak points of their warehouse hideout.
But Aoiki and her family counted on that. Sunny walked right into a trap and was now going to answer for her lies and tell us what we needed to know about Aten.
If we knew more about his movements, his plans, we could anticipate them and catch him off guard at just the right moment.
“You should join the church of Aten,” Sunny answered, not sticking to her previous role of strong and silent. “You too can feel the glory of his warmth. Feel exalted in his presence.”
Aoiki shifted near me. She was playing this off well, but I couldn’t imagine how she felt. Sunny had posed as her girlfriend for a hundred years, both of them fae. But Sunny did it only to use Aoiki and her ties to find the blade to free her sun god.
